Chapter 10

Viktor

Cyka blyat! The Russian language had an amazingly diverse and poetic collection of curses and insults, and half of them were tripping off my tongue as I stalked back down the hall. He wasn’t answering. Not the email, not his phone. He just holed himself up in that damn fortress and kept radio silence.

I knew logically that it was too early to tell, but this felt like a blown deal. I knew that a lot of billionaires had God complexes, all I had to do to verify that was look at national news. Graves may have thought he was above anything like consequences to his actions. He may have thought that micromanaging his niece was somehow going to keep her safe. He was dead wrong, but that didn’t stop him from acting on his assumptions.

But now we had his niece. The one he was so protective of that he secretly stuck a security team around her house at night. And his grand-nephew as well, a child. It did not fit his pattern to ignore their plight.

But the phone stayed silent in my hand. There was no report of a response from Graves at all to the message we’d sent. There was no indication that he’d done anything but squat silently in his castle in the sky, hiding behind his security.

Ignoring his niece’s desperation.

As soon as I got in my car I was on my phone, my first call was to Tolya. “How many of us are around the club this evening?”

His response took a few seconds. “Alexei, Nico, a few others. Why?”

“Emergency meeting. Has Alexei told you anything about the monitoring he’s been doing of Graves?”

There was another pause. “No, boss. Should I ask him?”

I looked at my watch, it was almost an hour since we sent our demands. “Tell him to gather everything he has so far and check in with the men he has watching the building. I’ll need to go over it in about ten, fifteen minutes.”

When Tolya next spoke, his voice was cautious. Wary, even. “What went wrong, Viktor?”

I winced slightly, I hated that I must have sounded so transparent, but Anatoly has known me for years, and can probably read my moods as easily as I can his.“Graves isn’t responding to anything, not even his niece’s calls. I have no idea why. Alexei’s men are monitoring his online activity, but so far there’s no sign of him. Nothing on his cellphone either. It’s early to tell for certain, but I smell trouble.”

There was another long pause. “I see. I’ll pull the others together, get you what you need.”

“Good.”

I rubbed my face as I pocketed my phone again. The purple one I left on the passenger’s seat beside me as I drove.

I played no music and didn’t select one of my books on tape either. My mood was too foul to enjoy either. A thought was echoing in my head, unbidden and unwelcome.

There was no point to this kidnapping in the first place. I could have left this poor woman and her child alone. They could be back home right now, safe and sound, instead of trapped and scared in my hands.

I should have just gone with the stolen helicopter. Storming the place from the top down, the exact opposite of what he would have expected. Instead, I had just spent one of the longest five minutes of my life watching pretty, kind Emma learn firsthand that her uncle was not the man she’d thought. That he was worse—worse even than I had suspected.

Or were we both reading too much into it? Maybe the old man collapsed on us when he got the news. Maybe something completely unrelated happened.

Not knowing for certain was pissing me off even more than the possibility that I had seriously overestimated this man’s loyalty to his overprotected niece. That the plan I had felt forced into could have been unnecessary.

What the hell was I going to do if this bastard of a man suddenly decided he didn’t really care about his family after all? How should I handle Emma and the boy? I couldn’t just let them go free after all of this.

They shouldn’t have had to pay for his sins. Not even for a few minutes. But here they were, helpless in my hands while Graves was out of reach.

***

Tolya saw my face as I stalked into the club and paled beneath his tan. He waved at a few of the others, and they assembled at my table as I sat down.

I put my game face on, though my head was starting to throb. “I want reports,” I snapped. “Graves. Any activity, any calls, any movement.”

“He’s still gone dark online. No presence, no posts, no transactions. My guess is, he’s keeping offline deliberately. Maybe having someone else do that work for him.” Alexei opened his laptop and started bringing up windows. “No activity in his bank accounts, either. At least the ones we know about.”

That didn’t help my confidence right now. “And the people physically watching the place? What about them?”

“They’ve been able to confirm that he’s home, and has taken a few meetings, including with a guy with his arm in a sling. Maybe the security man from the night we kidnapped Graves’s relatives.”

“Probably a good guess.” I shook my head, staring at all the evidence on Alexei’s screen that told me how we were failing to get our hands on the vicious old bastard. Emma’s phone stayed silent on the table in front of me. “I don’t understand this man. He had me fight my way through five men to get to his niece, and now he won’t answer a phone call to keep her safe?”

“Maybe he wasn’t keeping her or the boy safe out of love,” Tolya speculated, eyes narrowing thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

“Graves. Yes, he’s overprotective, but there are other reasons a man does that besides love.”

My frown deepened. What kind of man was Graves that he could protect his niece her whole life, invade her privacy to watch over her, and then not be moved at all when she called him begging for rescue?

I had not been unmoved. I was supposed to be cold, focused, and just as harsh as I needed to be. But when I heard her voice breaking as she’d left that message, it had felt like a needle sliding into my guts.

The men at my table had fallen silent. I looked up and saw them staring at me. Tolya had worry written across his face.

“Watch the building.” I handed Tolya Emma’s phone as Alexei nodded. “Tolya, if that man actually calls her back I want to know right away.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’m going home,” I said flatly. “I need to think.”

The men erupted into questions as I fell silent. What was I going to do about Igor’s gun deal? What about the police? The security man who had gotten away? And what was I going to do with that woman and child if Graves kept his radio silence?

“I’ll talk to Igor personally. Our contacts in the police department are aware of the situation and are handling it. Everything else depends on what we learn in the next twenty-four hours.” I gave my two lieutenants a pointed look as their men watched. “I want an immediate call if circumstances change with the Graves situation. I don’t care how small the change is.

“As for Kalashnikov, if he shows his face in my club again, let me know as well. He seems to know something about my brother’s murder, if he wasn’t just telling tales at a very coincidental time.”

“Do you think it’s possible he knows about the hitter? We still haven’t been able to track who Graves used exactly.” Tolya was looking at me uncomfortably, his meaty hands knotted together white-knuckled on the tabletop.

“Maybe.” The throbbing in my head had reached eye-watering levels. I didn’t get tension headaches too often, but when I did it felt like a tank was rolling over my sinuses. “I’m kind of hoping he doesn’t have anything useful or new to tell us. I just know he’ll hold it over me if he does.”

“It’s Igor, of course he will. He’ll try it even if he doesn’t even have anything of value, the man hasn’t been in his right mind about any of us for five years.” Tolya sounded exasperated.

I smirked and looked around the table. “Any further questions?”

There were none, so I stood. “Very well. You know where to reach me if I am needed. I have business to attend to.”

“Not stopping for a drink?” Tolya looked genuinely startled.

“Not this evening.” My head was already pounding too hard to dry myself out with hard liquor. “Again, keep me posted.”

It started raining again halfway home, fat droplets smacking against my windshield as I drove. Predictably, no one around me was slowing down or being more cautious. I stayed as focused as I could on the road. But Emma kept slipping back into my mind.

This isn’t right. It wasn’t right from the beginning, but now it really isn’t. I winced, imagining her sitting terrified in her room, trying to hide from the boy that their situation had, as far as she knew, turned irrevocably worse.

I would never dream of hurting her for her uncle’s sins, but she didn’t know that. For all she knows, I’ll put a bullet in her head the next time that I see her.

That wasn’t what I wanted. Whenever I thought of her, I thought of her beauty, her soft scent, her bright eyes. Her intelligence and wit, the strength she’d shown through all of this. You didn’t kidnap such a woman, or keep her hostage, or scare her.

You courted her. You seduced her. You gave her pleasure and made her crave more of you. And you never, ever, gave her reason to fear you.

That’s for my enemies,I thought as I steered around the trip’s first fender-bender. That is for her uncle.

***

The headache gave in to a good workout, a hot shower, and some rest. By the time I settled in to sleep, the pain had dwindled to a dull tenderness.

At first, I dreamed of my brother. Leon was sitting on top of his gravestone, feet hovering over his open grave. His mortal wound still blushed on his white shirtfront, and he was as white as the unstained silk.

“You’re not giving up, are you?” he asked, conversationally.

“Never.” I couldn’t hang onto my anger in dreams; the emotion behind that promise slipped away from me, but I talked on. “Not until you’re avenged.”

“It’s not just about revenge, Viktor,” he told me, but when I looked back at him, the headstone was unoccupied—and the grave was full.

I gasped awake to full darkness and the tap of rain on the nearby window. My bedroom was just warm enough, even with the air purifiers sending a draft through it.

I got up and strode naked through my room, passing the rack where I hung my holsters and headed for the ensuite. I ran water into the black marble basin and splashed it on my face, feeling like I’d either overslept or not slept at all. A sense of urgency was tugging at me.

I checked my phone. No messages, no texts. No fucking news. It had been another four hours since I last checked, and nothing.

Nothing but the guilt, and the certainty that I had done wrong by the doctor and her strangely familiar-looking nephew. Wrongs that I wasn’t sure I could ever make up for.

I had pulled on some underwear and was doing my stretches when my phone shrilled. I snatched it up, it was Alexei. “Talk to me.”

“He’s taken off.” His voice was out of breath and shook a little. “That son of a bitch has taken off!”

“What?” I straightened, my heart suddenly pounding with anger.

“Private helicopter, straight to an airstrip just off the coast. He’s running for it!”

The fury filled my body with sudden heat. “Track him. Find the plane he’s using, find the flight plan. We cannot afford to lose him!”

“I’ll do everything I can.” Alexei stammered. “What about the others?”

I paused, my mind racing, then made a quick decision. “Put as many resources on tracking that bastard as makes sense. The others can handle our day-to-day.”

“And the…” he hesitated. “Our hostages?”

“They just got promoted,” I said firmly. “The doctor just became the only person we have available who might have any idea where he went if we lose that plane. I will be enlisting her aid personally.”

“What makes you think she’ll cooperate?”

“Because it will earn her freedom no matter what her uncle does. Because she now has plenty of unanswered questions about the man, that I can help her satisfy. And because I suspect that her uncle has now jumped off the pedestal she had him on. There’s no way she’ll believe in him now.”

“I understand,” there was another hesitation. “But how do you plan to make her believe in you?”

“I’m working on that,” I said, and then more firmly, “But I will find a way.”